Word: lennons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first Lennon was resistant to Owen's skills. "You're just a professional Liverpudlian," sniped the cynical Beatle. "Better than being an amateur one," was Owen's smart-aleck response. Lennon was sold in that moment...
...What threw the music professor was the delivery system. To lovers of classical music, guitars and drums were the tools of peasants. It never occurred to such critics that the essence of music is the blend of melody, harmony and rhythm, irrespective of how it is performed. And in Lennon & McCartney the Beatles had songwriters with intuitive gifts for song creation. Record producer George Martin instinctively understood that his pupils were gifted, and nurtured their nascent curiosity rather than smothering them with Tin Pan Alley rules...
Long before she met John Lennon, in 1966, Ono had been part of the group of New York musicians and artists who would call themselves Fluxus, pioneers of conceptual and performance art. For her 1964 Cut Piece, Ono sat onstage at Carnegie Hall while audience members came up one by one to scissor off pieces of her clothes. Her "instruction paintings" of 1961 were just typed directives like WATCH THE SUN UNTIL IT BECOMES SQUARE...
...ideal instrument for mainstream pop, but it can have the cracked charm of Neil Young's or Kurt Cobain's. If she had not been too famous by the late '70s to make a name for herself, she might have found a niche in punk. Just hours before Lennon's death, she and John recorded her one indisputable pop wonderment, Walking on Thin Ice, a punkish war whoop that combined his saw-toothed guitar with her high-frequency keening...
...greatest conceptual project was marriage to Lennon. It let her inflate her thought balloons to global scale, but they burst. Those "bed-ins" for peace were sweet but also hard to distinguish from pure exhibitionism. The dreamy directives of her conceptual art became harder to square with the iron-clad narcissism of so much else that she did. "After unblocking one's mind," she once wrote, "by dispensing with visual, auditory and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us? Would there be anything? I wonder." By the end of this show you may still be wondering...